After bootstrapping for 15 years, energy renovation company Effy raises $22 million

Effy is at a crossroads. The energy renovation company based in France is doing well, but it is addressing a market that is much bigger than anticipated. That’s why it is making a bet. The company just closed a €20 million funding round (roughly $22 million at today’s exchange rate) from Felix Capital. This is the first external funding round for the company.

“Our story starts 15 years ago,” founder and CEO Frédéric Utzmann told me. “We tackled this market very early on because we really believed in it.”

At first, Effy wasn’t a tech-enabled startup. The company worked on energy renovation for public buildings, residential buildings and industrial facilities. “We started with heavy energy consuming projects with a business that was very much ‘brick and mortar,’ old school. But this allowed us to develop the company in a self-financed and profitable way,” Utzmann said.

Quickly after that, the company started acquiring websites and services that were useful for energy renovation projects. In 2011, the company acquired Calculeo, a tool that helps you calculate how much you can get in public subsidies for energy renovation work. In 2015, Effy acquired Quelle énergie, a VC-backed startup that could calculate how much money you would save by insulating your roof, changing your windows and more.

At the same time, Effy’s traffic started growing rapidly. Search engine optimizations led to more organic traffic. Effy started building a significant network of contractors and redirecting home owners to these partners.

In 2019, Effy chose to focus exclusively on small residential projects. Engie acquired its B2B activities for an undisclosed amount. Effy chose to reinvest everything in product development and growth. In addition to organic traffic, the company spent some money on brand awareness ads (like TV spots), as well as Google and social media ads.

And it has paid off, as Effy attracted 18 million visitors to its websites in 2022. Some people just want to use Effy’s tools to see how much money they could save with energy renovation projects. Others go one step further and submit a request for some construction work.

Effy then contacts those potential customers to understand their needs. To give you a sense of Effy’s scale, last year, the company ended up contacting 500,000 individuals and completing 100,000 energy renovation projects. Effy handled €800 million in transactions on its platform.

Owning the relationship

Effy can still improve its service in several ways. In particular, its marketplace is still mostly a lead generation product for energy renovation contractors. When potential clients want to move forward with their home projects, they are connected with independent contractors.

These contractors supply quotes, which means that it creates some friction for the end customer. They have to compare quotes between multiple contractors and pick one.

Of course, Effy spends a lot of time curating its marketplace. There are currently 3,800 contractors working with Effy. The company gathered 16,000 reviews and the average rating is 4.8 stars.

Similarly, Effy can handle the paperwork to obtain subsidies for energy renovation work. The company takes a cut on this administrative process and charges contractors a small nominal fee for new potential clients.

Effy now wants to switch to a first-party marketplace model. Clients interact directly with Effy and negotiate the quote with Effy. “Historically, we had an almost 100% third-party business — it represents 90% of our business today,” Utzmann said.

It opens up some new possibilities on the product front. First, there are a lot of optimization possibilities when it comes to creating a quote, sourcing materials and everything that isn’t the construction work itself. This way, contractors can accept more jobs as Effy handles the rest.

Second, Effy could start offering some financing options with partners. For small amounts, Effy can use “buy now, pay later” products. For bigger sums, Effy has an internal team that can negotiate credit lines with Sofinco and Cetelem.

Sure, energy renovation projects can be expensive. But customers often end up paying smaller bills once these projects are done. Effy could even look at the impact on your bills thanks to smart meters.

“Let’s say you pay €2,000 per year and you will pay €1,000 per year starting tomorrow. You could set aside €800 to pay back your investments. You end up saving less because you have to pay something back, but your house is also worth more money,” Utzmann said.

In addition to this product roadmap, Effy’s business could end up growing rapidly thanks to favorable market conditions. The war in Ukraine has had a significant impact on energy bills.

At the same time, the European Union wants to finance projects that have a positive impact on climate change. Residential buildings indirectly generate a ton of carbon emissions as it requires a lot of energy to heat and cool them. Many EU countries are rolling out generous subsidies to foster energy renovation projects.

Finally, Effy is only available in France for now. The company could expand to other European countries in the future, starting with Germany and Spain.

After bootstrapping for 15 years, energy renovation company Effy raises $22 million by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Carbon Maps helps the food industry reduce their climate impact

Meet Carbon Maps, a new French startup that raised $4.3 million (€4 million) just a few weeks after its inception. The company is building a software-as-a-service platform for the food industry so that they can track the environmental impact of each of their products in their lineup. The platform can be used as a basis for eco ratings.

While there are quite a few carbon accounting startups — like Greenly, Sweep, Persefoni and Watershed — Carbon Maps isn’t an exact competitor as it doesn’t calculate a company’s carbon emissions as a whole. It doesn’t focus on carbon emissions exclusively either. Carbon Maps focuses on the food industry and evaluates the environmental impact of products — not companies.

Co-founded by Patrick Asdaghi, Jérémie Wainstain and Estelle Huynh, the company managed to raise a seed round with Breega and Samaipata — two VC firms that invested in Asdaghi’s previous startup, FoodChéri.

FoodChéri is a full-stack food delivery company that designs its own meals and sells them directly to end customers with an important focus on healthy food. It also operates Seazon, a sister company for batch deliveries. The startup was acquired by Sodexo a few years ago.

“On the day that I left, I started working on food and health projects again,” Asdaghi told me. “I wanted to make an impact, so I started moving up the supply chain and looking at agriculture.”

And the good news is that Asdaghi isn’t the only one looking at the supply chain of the food industry. In France, some companies started working on an eco-score with a public agency (ADEME) overseeing the project. It’s a life cycle assessment that leads to a letter rating from A to E.

While very few brands put these letters on their labels, chances are companies that have good ratings will use the eco-score as a selling point in the coming years.

But these ratings could become even more widespread as regulation is still evolving. The European Union is even working on a standard — the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF). European countries can then create their own scoring systems based on these European criteria, meaning that food companies will need good data on their supply chains.

“The key element in the new eco-score that’s coming up is that there will be some differences within a product category because ingredients and farming methods are different,” Asdaghi said. “It’s going to take into consideration the carbon impact, but also biodiversity, water consumption and animal welfare.”

For instance, when you look at ground beef, it’s extremely important to know whether farmers are using soy from Brazil or grass to feed cattle.

“We don’t want to create the ratings. We want to create the tools that help with calculations — a sort of SAP,” Asdaghi said.

So far, Carbon Maps is working with two companies on pilot programs as it’s going to require a ton of work to cover each vertical in the food industry. The startup creates models with as many criteria as possible to calculate the impact of each criteria. It uses data from standardized sources like GHG Protocol, IPCC, ISO 14040 and 14044.

The company targets food brands because they design the recipes and select their suppliers. Eventually, Carbon Maps hopes that everybody across the supply chain is going to use its platform in one way or another.

“You can’t have a true climate strategy if you don’t have some collaboration across the chain,” Asdaghi said.

Carbon Maps helps the food industry reduce their climate impact by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Bibak is building the software stack to manage reusable food containers at scale

French startup Bibak (formerly known as La Consigne GreenGo) has amassed $6.4 million (€6 million) in an equity funding round and debt. The company wants to put an end to single-use plastic food packaging and replace those with reusable food containers.

Founders Future, MAIF Impact, Seed One, Notus Technologies SWEN Capital Partners’ Blue Ocean fund as well as several business angels are participating in the startup’s funding round. The startup closed this round in November 2022.

The fact that Bibak is a French company is a competitive advantage as regulation recently changed. Since January 1st, 2023, restaurants have had to use reusable food containers for people who eat there.

“It changes the scale of the business and the reuse industry,” co-founder and CEO Yasmine Dahmane told me.

And yet, Bibak has been around for a quite a while. The startup began in 2018 with French corporate catering service companies like Sodexo, Compass and Elior. The company now also targets the event industry as well as fast-food chains like Burger King.

But Bibak doesn’t want to do it all. While many restaurants are buying professional dishwashers, the startup believes that most food containers won’t be cleaned in restaurants. Instead, a third-party company will come and exchange your piles of dirty dishes, plastic boxes and cutlery with clean ones.

Instead of trying to do it all, Bibak is focusing on the area where it can bring more value — that’s the tech and platform part of this flourishing industry.

“We let professional washing and logistics companies do their job. It’s a much more solid model because we can bring in industrial washing companies,” Dahmane said.

So what does Bibak bring to the table then? First, Bibak gives some visibility through data. Customers can use the platform to see their inventory in real time, count how many food containers are missing, create a deposit system and see the environmental impact of reusable containers.

Second, Bibak helps you when it comes to collecting used food containers. The startup can send you smart return kiosks and create a deposit system that works for your specific restaurant. It can be a gamified system with rewards or a straightforward deposit system.

Third, Bibak also is a fintech company in a way. The company can manage the cashback and reward system for you.

The good news is that Bibak becomes more and more efficient as it scales. “We want to provide a cost per wash that is as low as possible,” Dahmane said.

The company targets big clients at first as it thinks smaller restaurants will follow course once these big chains are on board. Overall, more than 1.5 million of single-use packaging items have been avoided. Bibak competes with another French startup called Pyxo.

People working for Société Générale, Engie, Hermès, Danone or Vinci are already using Bibak food containers. And on the weekend, when people go to Roland Garros or We Love Green, they are interacting with Bibak as well when they order a drink. Soon, you may also receive a Bibak container when you order food online.

Bibak is building the software stack to manage reusable food containers at scale by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Entocycle grabs $5 million for its insect breeding technology

Even if insects don’t sound appealing to you, black soldier flies could play an essential role in the food chain in the coming years. In particular, these flies’ larvae can become an important source of proteins for livestock and fish.

That’s why Entocycle is raising another $5 million in a Series A funding round led by Climentum Capital, a European climate-focused VC firm. Lowercarbon Capital and ACE & Company are participating in the round as well.

Teampact Ventures is also investing in Entocycle. This new French VC firm is partnering with current and former athletes to invest in tech companies. In addition to contributing money, those sports professionals help startups with team-building advice and mentorship. In that case, Antoine Dupont, Nikola Karabatic, James Haskell and Antoine Brizard are investing in Entocycle.

While Entocycle has been around since 2016, the team of 21 people will now try and commercialize its products. In particular, with this new injection of cash, Entocycle plans to iterate on its flagship product — the Entocycle Neo.

It’s a hardware module that can be used in insect farms to monitor and collect data on the health and productivity of black soldier flies. The Entocycle Neo uses optical sensors combined with a software solution that analyzes images and accurately measures production.

By automating these processes, Entocycle hopes it can increase productivity in insect farms. Using the company’s modules should lead to higher-feed conversion rates and lower mortality.

Similarly, Entocycle has developed a fly cage with built-in climate control. The idea is that Entocycle can help companies in the food industries get started with black soldier fly larvae so that they can secure their supply of proteins.

And this is key to understanding the appeal behind Entocycle. Switching to insect-based proteins could drive down soybean production and imports, as well as deforestation — indirectly. Larvae are a low-carbon alternative as they can be produced anywhere. Insect farms could also integrate into the waste management cycle as black solider flies gobble down food waste.

Entocycle grabs $5 million for its insect breeding technology by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Renaissance Fusion raises $16.4 million to build nuclear fusion technology in Europe

Meet Renaissance Fusion, a Grenoble-based startup that has been working on nuclear fusion for the past couple of years. The company recently raised $16.4 million (€15 million) in funding in a seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital.

Several European investors also participated in the round, such as HCVC, Positron Ventures and Norrsken VC. Unruly Capital led the company’s pre-seed round.

“We are proud to support Francesco Volpe and his team in the emergence and industrialization in France and in Europe of a disruptive solution in energy production and distribution technologies. Grenoble is a highly strategic location that allows them to benefit from a favorable environment for the development of nuclear energy, a strong ecosystem such as the CEA and an unrivaled pool of talent,” Alexis Houssou, founder and managing partner at HCVC, said in a statement.

Unlike most nuclear fusion experiments that are based on tokamaks, Renaissance Fusion is working on a stellarator reactor. The company is well aware that there is a long and windy road ahead as it expects to be able to ship a small nuclear fusion reactor with a 1 GW capacity in the 2030s. It wouldn’t operate power plants directly. Instead, the company would sell its reactors to plant constructors and operators.

“We have a technology that is pretty unique,” Renaissance Fusion founder Francesco Volpe told me. Instead of designing complicated three-dimensional coils to generate a magnetic field, Renaissance Fusion greatly simplifies this process by drawing tracks on a cylinder.

After some calculation based on the magnetic field that you want to generate, the team can determine the shape of the coils that you need. The cylinder rotates around an axis while a device moves left and right to engrave tracks with a laser on the surface of the cylinder.

Cylinder blocks are then combined together to form a reactor. This modularity should help when it comes to shipment and logistics. As for the neutrons emitted by the nuclear reaction inside the cylinder, Renaissance Fusion wants to use liquid Lithium to create thick walls that separate plasma from the outside world.

“We inject a layer of liquid metal. It flows around the inside of the cylinder and then it’s extracted at the bottom. It’s thick enough to absorb the majority of the neutrons,” Volpe said.

This liquid metal is also used to extract heat from the stellarator, which can be used to create steam, which can be used to propel turbines, which can be used generate electricity.

According to the startup’s founder, Renaissance Fusion is quite innovative with its use of liquid metal. “We are the only one in commercial magnetic fusion where the liquid lithium faces the plasma,” Volpe said.

Right now, the company can create liquid Lithium-based walls that are 1-centimeter thick. It will require a lot of iterations before it can be used in nuclear fusion as Renaissance Fusion estimates that it would require a thickness of 30 to 40 centimeters.

The company is already thinking about commercial applications that could be released before the 2030s. For instance, Volpe believes that Renaissance Fusion’s coil patterning technology could be used for MRI and energy storage: “whenever you need a strong magnetic field, a large volume and high precision,” he said.

With today’s funding round, Renaissance Fusion plans to triple the size of its team to 60 people by the end of 2023. In many ways, this is still the early days of Renaissance Fusion. So let’s see how it pans out in the coming years.

Renaissance Fusion raises $16.4 million to build nuclear fusion technology in Europe by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch